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Is bit rot really a threat that I should worry about? (midwest.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have recently become interested in mini PCs, but one thing that is stopping me is a feeling that bit rot could cause me to lose data.

Is bit rot something to worry about when storing data for services such as Git, or Samba. I have another PC right now that is setup with btrfs raid1 and backups locally and to the cloud, however was thinking about downsizing for the benefit of size and power usage.

I know many people use the mini PCs such as ThinkCentres, Optiplex, EliteDesks and others, I am curious if I should be worried about losing data due to bit rot, or is bit rot a really rare occurrence?

Let's say I have backups with a year of retention, wouldn't it be possible that the data becomes corrupt and that it isn't noticed until after a year? for example archived data that I don't look at often but might need in the future.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I guess, my primary concern was if I didn't have the computer with ZFS(in my case btrfs but similar thing). Maybe it is for the best that I keep the raid setup to scrub and make sure important data is safe, and use the smaller single disk mini PC for services and data that isn't as important.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

If you have a NAS, then just put iSCSI disks on the NAS, and network-share those iSCSI fake-disks to your mini-PCs.

iSCSI is "pretend to be a hard-drive over the network". iSCSI can exist "after" ZFS or BTRFS, meaning your scrubs / scans will fix any issues. So your mini-PC can have a small C: drive, but then be configured so that iSCSI is mostly over the D: iSCSI / Network drive.

iSCSI is very low-level. Windows literally thinks its dealing with a (slow) hard drive over the network. As such, it works even in complex situations like Steam installations, albeit at slower network-speeds (it gotta talk to the NAS before the data comes in) rather than faster direct connection to hard drive (or SSD) speeds.

Bitrot is a solved problem. It is solved by using bitrot-resilient filesystems with regular scans / scrubs. You build everything on top of solved problems, so that you never have to worry about the problem ever again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

As such, it works even in complex situations like Steam installations

Steam also works with NFS just fine (at least for the libraries, maybe not a full Steam installation), although Samba can be problematic in my experience. But your overall point is reasonable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for that information about iSCSI, I hadn't looked into it. I will probably just stick with my primary server for the moment, maybe rebuild it into a NAS, and than use mini PCs with it as the storage.